If you’ve ever dumped a bag of coins into a machine only to have it spit out a couple of slugs, tokens and foreign coins you’ll understand what the City of West Hollywood is dealing with.
Except the city’s parking division has pulled 500 pounds worth of mutilated U.S. coins, slugs and tokens from parking meters — roughly the weight of a piano, grizzly bear or your average dumpster.
(By the way, before you go out to buy a bunch of washers to cut your parking costs, the city notes that meters only register time for U.S. coins.)
What’s the city going to do with all that excess coinage?
On Monday, the City Council agreed, as it does routinely roughly every six months, to let it be auctioned to coin dealers or “other interested parties.”
“This is because it is not an option for the city to deposit any of the material collected into a bank account due to the fact that banks do not offer currency conversion services for bulk foreign coinage, nor accept deposits of U.S. coins that have been cut, bent or flattened,” reads the staff report.
The auction money will go to a good cause. “The money collected from the sale will be put back in the ‘parking meter revenue account,'” the report says.
